Protecting the right to know

By Madison Taylor / Times-News

Published: Friday, November 29, 2013 at 02:16 PM.

Not yet anyway.

WHAT CONSTITUTES an excessive public records request is an interesting question. When I worked for the Daily News in Jacksonville, we asked Camp Lejeune for documents regarding the use of lead-based paint in base housing. The military didn’t respond for more than a month before telling us that we were seeking thousands of pages of paper concerning construction and renovation of houses on the installation dating back several years. Making copies was going to cost hundreds of dollars.

They offered an alternative. They allowed our reporter to come to a records room and go through the paperwork herself. We agreed. She did her job no matter how “excessive” it might seem. It took more than a week. She got a great story, an important story that impacted the health of children being raised on the base.

But that amount of documents to sort is the exception.

“Excessive may be having to look through a year’s worth of records,” said John Bussian, an expert on media law, a longtime attorney for the Times-News and a lobbyist for the North Carolina Press Association. “But there are things to which you routinely reply. Charging every time that it’s a 30-minute job is imposing a barrier to access, effectively. The average person isn’t going to be able to pay for the manpower request in order to respond.”

He called the mandate from the governor’s office a step backward in the ongoing fight to keep government open and transparent. That’s a problem. North Carolina is already one of the least open states in America.

In the regular working world, an “excessive” amount of time on an assigned task might be a couple of days, even a week. In the world according to Gov. Pat McCrory and his staff, it adds up to less time than it takes to eat lunch.

Yes, 30 minutes on a job meets the standard for “excessive” in state government these days. That’s the baseline McCrory and his staff apparently set for charging fees to supply government records upon request of the taxpaying public — the very folks who own the records to begin with.

Funny thing, state and local governments have always supplied this information at no cost or for a nominal fee to pay for the paper or CDs necessary to make copies for those seeking public information. They always did so because North Carolina law is pretty clear on the subject, stating that government documents “are the property of the people” and that copies should be provided “as promptly as possible” at “free or at minimal cost.”

Now, newspapers, TV stations and regular folks are being charged via invoices totaling hundreds of dollars for requests largely of things being supplied digitally that should take little time, effort or cost at all.

Apparently the McCrory administration believes a “special service charge” should also be paid to underwrite alleged manpower used to track down documents such as emails — emails that are on a searchable database it takes just moments to seek and find. A more cynical person might believe that if McCrory hired competent people to work in public communications for state departments rather than former campaign staff members, the job could be accomplished without an “excessive” amount of time being used.

But I’m not that excessively cynical.

Not yet anyway.

WHAT CONSTITUTES an excessive public records request is an interesting question. When I worked for the Daily News in Jacksonville, we asked Camp Lejeune for documents regarding the use of lead-based paint in base housing. The military didn’t respond for more than a month before telling us that we were seeking thousands of pages of paper concerning construction and renovation of houses on the installation dating back several years. Making copies was going to cost hundreds of dollars.

They offered an alternative. They allowed our reporter to come to a records room and go through the paperwork herself. We agreed. She did her job no matter how “excessive” it might seem. It took more than a week. She got a great story, an important story that impacted the health of children being raised on the base.

But that amount of documents to sort is the exception.

“Excessive may be having to look through a year’s worth of records,” said John Bussian, an expert on media law, a longtime attorney for the Times-News and a lobbyist for the North Carolina Press Association. “But there are things to which you routinely reply. Charging every time that it’s a 30-minute job is imposing a barrier to access, effectively. The average person isn’t going to be able to pay for the manpower request in order to respond.”

He called the mandate from the governor’s office a step backward in the ongoing fight to keep government open and transparent. That’s a problem. North Carolina is already one of the least open states in America.

IS THERE a workable solution to this impasse? Bussian believes so.

“There’s an easier way, and this is one we have thrown out to the governor’s office,” Bussian said. “Instead of having state agencies go through the process of individual public records requests, why not put all the records online?”

It makes too much sense.

“It’s a finite set of records. Just slap them online every day,” Bussian said. “Then when there is something that involves attorney-client privilege or personnel, it comes down to a specific request. Then you’re talking about a handful of records instead of 5,000.”

The free flow of information would be beneficial to the public, to reporters and to government workers.

“If records were online, you wouldn’t have to ask to see them. It would eliminate the request and response system used today, and it would be a better world,” Bussian said.

The governor’s office — and state departments — could simply post every single public record generated in a day. Certainly it could hold back documents that involve records not currently open, according to law.

“If you want to see the things that are pegged as privileged, then you can request those, and the debate ensues. And that shouldn’t cost anybody anything,” Bussian said.

It’s not a strange idea at all. Bussian said a few states already post records online, including Florida, which is a leader in open government. In North Carolina, the state budget office under Art Pope is beginning to put records on its website.

Posting records online seems to me to be the most logical step and certainly a direction North Carolina needs to take to shine more light on government.

“Things were not in the best shape before this happened, and I view this as a setback,” Bussian said, referring to the charges established for public records by McCrory’s staff. “We need to find ways to be more transparent, not add burdens to the public’s right to know. And we can do that by just putting the records online.”

Madison Taylor is editor of the Times-News. Contact him by email at mtaylor@thetimesnews.com.